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The overall tone of “Do not go gentle into that good night” is best defined as grief-stricken. This claim may seem surprising, given the speaker’s passionate argument for the need to remain noncompliant in the face of death. Indeed, the speaker’s repeated insistence that their father refuse death seems to have a tone better characterized as defiant. And yet, the defiance the speaker wants their father to cultivate is guaranteed to fail. Regardless of how much he “rage[s] against the dying of the light,” he will still ultimately “go . . . into that good night.” The sheer inevitability of their father’s death—and of death in general—is clearly upsetting for the speaker. In response to this inevitability, the speaker’s one tactic for alleviating their own pain is to insist that their father not give up without a fight. The speaker seems to think that as long as their father refuses to sit back and accept death, their own grief, though inescapable, may prove less painful than it otherwise might have been. In this way, an anticipatory sense of grief suffuses the whole poem.

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